By the end of Boyhood, Nikolenka has found a companion in Nekhlyudov, a friend of his older brother Volodya. Their relationship brings about a feeling of resolve within Nikolenka, as the young boy has finally found a friend and teacher with whom he can personally and intellectually relate. This friend comes to him at a period in his maturing life when he has begun enjoying his studies and is preparing to study at the Universtiy, and the friendship that ‘knows itself too well,’ puts a reader at rest, Nikolai having found a suitable place in reality to share his innermost feelings, outside of his metaphysical world.

The progressions of Nikolai’s character, up until these later years of his boyhood, were confined within the abstracts of his childhood imagination. Though his many teachers and family figures rarely saw the results of their lessons, Nikolai’s brilliant intellectual abstractions made of them great moral issues or matters of discourse (as was his tendancy to make of his feelings), and constantly subjected himself to the torments of his environment and aswell to those of his childish natures. What Nikolenka learned through his early years fit far from the standards of a formal education, though he learned much through his world and from the individuals around him.

The narrative takes us down the trails of the young boy’s thought, and illustrates to a reader a disconnect between his world of imaginings and the ongoings of the world around him. The mysticism he finds in the woods upon a butterfly’s wings greatly interrupts his concentration in the heat of their hunt, and when confronting himself in the face of a disapproving fellow hunter recalls: “But you should have heard the tone in which he said it! I would rather he had hung me to his saddle like a hare” (35). Nikolai holds himself with great accountability his misgivings in the contexts of the material world, though finds himself often distractedly interested in his relationship with the immense world of his imagination. It is through this immagination that his convictions take shape (as through his inner narrative they are revealed in secrecy), and is thus a focal point to his growth and progressions through his world.

Tolstoy begins young Nikolai’s Childhood with his unpleasant awakening and aggression towards the individual responsible, his early teacher figure, Karl Ivanych. The lessons of Karl Ivanych have little to offer in and of themselves, and it seems from the beginning that even Karl’s attitude towards his teaching is less than wholly committed. A man of mild intellect and humble comic charm, it becomes evident with the progression of the novel that Karl is more dependant upon the children and their family than they are upon him, and Nikolai’s sense of familial relations become convoluted early on with the dispute between his familiy and Karl Ivanych, a teacher and fatherly figure to him and Volodya.

Upon the arrival of the time when Karl’s employed service to the family was no longer needed, the loving familial relationship was given notice of it’s termination by the head of the family and the maker of such decisions, Piotr Alexandrych, Nikolai’s father, who the children had come to know as one of contrasting paternal order. Nikolai “could not understand why papa called Karl Ivanych a devil” (41), and experiences unconsciously the pluralities of parenthood and short strange glimpses into the twisted world of adults. In this situation, as in many others, Nikolai is left grappeling between the fringes of characters, at a loss to adult comprehension though evaluating his feelings within the circumstance and proceeding with such an understanding thereafter.

The established relationships within the family, the servants and friends that occupy the country estate day-to-day, are arranged in shapes and orders that become subconscious convictions to the young observes, who take the relationships as nothing unordinary. The extent to which Nikolai’s attitude towards an individual is shaped by that observed of a parental figure towards a person is later evident in his behavior towards Princess Kornakova, on whose dress he tramples and tears purposefully on several repeated occasions. Aside from her unpleasant appearance, and her gravitation towards ‘the birch,’ Nikolai observes his Grandmother’s conversation with the young women, and notes the numerous undertones of discord amidst their perfectly decent aristocratic conversation. Nikolai notes the tensions and digests the unsaid realities of Princess Kornavova’s visitation.

Nikolai’s relationship with the other individuals in his life all reflect different feelings and emotions or present different aspects of change within his person or world. Katya and Lyuba remind him of his childhood and maintain his image of Volodya and him as two young brothers. After his mother’s death and their transition to Moscow from the country, Nikolai observes the dramatic changes in Katya’s life, and given her family’s economic instability, her life as they’d known it may change forever upon their arrival.

“An idea changes to a conviction in a way of its own, often a quite unexpected one and different from that by which other minds arrive at the same conclusion. This conversation with Katya, which affected me deeply and caused me to reflect upon her future position, was the way in my case” (119).

Such was the way for Nikolai in may situations. The buffer of consequence to his carefree life often heged his exerience from a world of harsher realities, though stumbling across them, as he did in this passage, he lives their experience through the soul of his imagination. Through these passages Nikolai’s heady feelings are communicated to the reader, and though not necessarily the implications of his future, a reader is wholly convinced of his experience.

The power of his imaginative experiences is imensly strong within themselves as well. The dynamics between Nikolai’s relationship with the world and his imagination, is brought before the interesting observations of the young boy at his mother’s funeral and reception. In one scene ‘truth’ enters, or his feelings of “genuine grief,” during a period of unconscious.

“I imagined her now in one, now in a nother situation: alive, gay and smiling; then suddenly some feature in the pale face before my eyes arrested my attention and I remembered the dreadful reality… Then again visions replaced the reality, to be shattered by the consciousness of the reality. At last my imagination grew weary, it ceased to deceive me. The consciousness of the reality vanished too and I became oblivious of everything. I do not know how long I remained in this state, nor what it was: I only know that for a time I ceased to be aware of my existence and experienced a kind of exalted, ineffably sweet, sad happiness” (93).

It becomes apparent to Nikolai the various modalities of thought that occupy his mind in the scenes following this experience. His vain desires become forefront, and his conscious becomes the painful incencerities of his reality themselves.

“As I recall my impressions now it seems to me that only that momentary forgetfulness of self was genuine grief… now a desire to show that I prayed more than anyone else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi’s cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings… Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me” (94).

Nikolai’s feelings are intertwined and opposing, a composite of many contrasting feelings. Struggling to terms with the purity of his visions, he cannot reconcile the weight of his natural desires to the point of feeling genuine sorrow. He cannot bring his conscious naturally to this sincere level of being, and is frustrated too with those around him, observing their similar compromise or lack of sincerity.

As is the case in the later days of his boyhood, Nikolai learned much from the experiences of others throughout his childhood. As one to generally disregard the slight importance of his formal lessons, Nikolai sought beyond their face-value the humanism to their greater context. Nikolai would abstract situations, such as his confrontations with St. Jérome, to live through intensified experiences of punishment. Rescued at the arms of a parent, he would wake in bed and exclaim within himself the joy of being alive. His natural desires, whose consequence he came to know soon after his actions thereof, were in a sense his greatest teacher, and throughout his years stiched the boundary between his childhood imagination and the growing realities of his life as a young man.